Wherever Charles Lamb discourses upon books, he assumes the critical attitude that deals with literature as a living force, as something built for human appeal. He met Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer on several occasions, and we can imagine the delight he took in shocking their ladylike senses by his witty and sudden remarks. At one period some dispute and ill-feeling existed between himself and Mrs. Barbauld, due to a false report that she had lampooned his drama, “John Woodvil.”
Elia was not the sort of literary devotee to sanction anemic literature for children; his plea was for the vitalising of the nursery book. On October 23, 1802, he wrote to Coleridge:
“Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics, ... and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deign’d to reach them off an exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary ask’d for them. Mrs. B’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.”
He saw the penalty that lay in cramming the child with natural history instead of furnishing him with some creative appeal. We can forgive Elia all his pranks when he thus pleads the genial claim of imagination; if, in a witty vein, he called Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Inchbald the “bald” old women, we must understand that Lamb had his petulant hours, and that children’s literature of the day was sufficient to increase them!
The purport of “Evenings at Home” is instruction. Within the compass of a few pages, objects crowd one upon the other as thick and as fast as virtues do in Miss Edgeworth. Such keenness and alertness in observing common things, as are cultivated in “Eyes and No Eyes,” stagger the intellect. It is well to teach your young companions to feel the hidden possibilities of nature and to cultivate within them a careful observation; but there is a vacation time for the mind, and the world, though it may be a school-room, is also a very healthy place to play in. Mr. Andrews, the immaculate teacher, is represented by the artist, in my copy of the book, as seated in a chair, with a compass in one hand resting upon a book, while behind him stretches the outline of a map; the two boys stand in front of him like prisoners before the bar. Here then is a new algebraic formula in the literature for the young.
Mrs. Barbauld thus represents a transition stage in juvenile writing; education and narrative walk side by side. She made it possible, in the future, for Peter Parley and for Rollo to thrive. Thomas Day foreshadowed the method of retelling incidents from the classics and from standard history and travel,—a form which is practised to a great extent by our present writers, who thread diverse materials on a slender wire of subsidiary story, and who, like Butterworth and Knox, invent untiring families of travellers who go to foreign parts, who see things, and then who talk out loud about them.
But before this secularisation gained marked hold, a new tributary is to be noted, which flowed into the moral stream,—a tributary which afforded the moral impulse a definite field to work in, which centred its purpose upon a distinct class. For heretofore the writers of juvenile literature had aimed for a general appeal. The struggle was now to be between the Sunday-school and the text-book.
III. The Sunday-school; Raikes; Hannah More; Mrs. Trimmer.
If the Sunday-school movement had not assumed some proportions about this time, it would have been necessary to create a practical outlet for the moral energy which dominated the authors of whom we have been writing. Had Robert Raikes not conceived his plan when he did, the ethical impulse would have run riot in a much wilder fashion, and would have done no good at all. For, whatever may be said against the old-time Sunday-school in a critical vein, one cannot ignore that its establishment brought immediate benefit. As it was, the new institution furnished the objective point for which the didactic school was blindly groping, and developed the idea of personal service. The social ideal was beginning to germinate.
Robert Raikes (1735 or 6–1811) was by profession a printer. He was of benevolent disposition and met with much to arouse his sympathy for the lower classes, whom he found indifferent to religion and hopelessly uncouth in their daily living. With the religious revival which swept through England around 1770, caused by the preaching of George Whitefield, Raikes began his work in earnest, first among the city prisons, where he was brought in contact with surprising conditions which had long lain in obscurity because of a wide-spread public indifference.